Day 2. Ziplining through the Rain Forest.

We woke up early Tuesday morning so that we could me up with our Zipline guides at "the basketball court beside the baseball field". OK? I was so excited about ziplining but was a little confused about the meet up place. We needed to grab breakfast so we stopped at the drive-thru at Burger King. Great idea, right? Good thing there are pictures and numbers, unfortunately there are also choices within the numbers. Needless to say we didn't get it quite right but luckily we liked what we ended up with.

So we headed to "the basketball court beside the baseball field" and see 3 other people waiting as well. Turned out they were a mother/daughter and daughter's bff. The mother, Diana, was originally from PR but now lives in New Jersey. Daughter, Nicole, lives with bff, Ashley, in Hollywood, CA and they are both teachers. They both just graduated from UCLA with their master's degrees as well. They were all really sweet and they loved Terry because he helped Diana so much when we were hiking.

Anyway, our guides, Jaime and Roque, met up with us and we jumped back into the car to their little house that they store all of the equipment. This was why we met at "the basketball court beside the baseball field", we would have never found it. So we signed our lives away and got our equipment and started hiking through El Yunque Rain Forest. BEAUTIFUL!!
On our hike up I couldn't stop taking pictures. I couldn't believe the beauty that was around me. Talk about God's country!!! This was unreal.



Disclaimer: From here on out you will see MANY self portraits of Terry and I. Love it or leave it, it's my blog :)
We hiked up and up and up and up and I was pretty much worn out by the time we got to the first zipline. But I was still REALLY excited.


Helmets on and we are ready to go. The first line was short and sweet. They eased us into it nicely.


At the end of the first zipline we had an assisted rappel. So fun. I love to rappel. I haven't done it ages but it was alot easier than I remembered. Maybe because of the "assisted" part.
Made it safely to the ground. By the way, it never did rain on us in the Rain Forest.
Terry thought he would play with the camera while he was waiting on everyone else to rappel. Funny little guy.
And here we go again. In all there were 7 ziplines and 3 rappels. The longest zipline was 900 feet.
The whole time we were going through all of this, Jaime and Roque were giving us biology and geology lessons. They are both from PR. Jaime has his bachelor's degree in geology and Roque went to Michigan State and is working on something at Berkley now. They are both unbelievably smart. They previously worked on a zipline on the other side of the island in another rain forest. There wasn't anything like this in El Yunque so they decided to go out on their own. They lease this land and built all of this course on their own. They are great at what they do and we learned so much along the way. They are the ones that told us about the haze being from the Sahara Desert. They also told us all about how the island was formed, from volcanoes. They told us about all of the fruit trees and so much more that I can now not remembered. I guess I should have taken notes.


This is me coming across the last zipline that was 900 feet. It was amazing. You start out in the canopy and then it opens up and you are out in the wide open area. I can't say enough how beautiful it was.
I slowed down to much and didn't make it all the way so they had to send me a backpack to hang on to and pull me in. I don't feel bad because Terry didn't make it either.
The day spent in El Yunque is one that will not be forgotten any time soon.




After it was all over Terry and I decided to go exploring through the rest of the rain forest. We were starving so we got directions to a great little bakery. We were able to communicate well enough to order the best ham and cheese sandwiches we have ever eaten. I would go back to Luquillo, Puerto Rico just for these sandwiches. We ordered 2 but ended up sharing one and saving the other for breakfast the next morning. They were THAT GOOD!!




We kept hearing about this great waterfall that you could swim in but we couldn't find it. This was as good as it got for us. We later figured out where the waterfall was and I was really disappointed we didn't find it when we had the chance. There's always next time!!




When we got back to the resort the haze had really started to clear up and we had an even better view than the day before. We had a fabulous steak dinner that night and headed to bed early. We were stuffed and dead tired. Besides we had the waterpark to look forward to the next day!!